londongrip.co.uk
Welcome to London Grip, a forum for reviews of books, shows & events – plus quarterly postings of new poetry.
Our most recent posts are listed below. Older posts can be explored via the search box and topic list.
For more information & guidelines on submitting reviews or poems please visit our Home page.

Aug 29 2015

# London Grip New Poetry – Autumn 2015

*

This issue of London Grip features new poems by:

*Alison Hill *Bruce Christianson *Fiona Larkin *Chris Stewart *Emma Lee *Ian Humphreys
*Tom McFadden *Rosie Johnston *Robert Nisbet *Katherine Venn *Ruth Bidgood
*Mary Franklin *Clare Crossman *F M Brown *Keith Nunes *S J Mannion *Peter Daniels
*Rangi Faith *Nancy Mattson *Cathleen Allyn Conway *Sarah James *Wendy French
*Tracey Peterson *Merryn Williams *David Flynn

.

Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors

.

A printer-friendly version of London Grip New Poetry
can be obtained at LG New Poetry Autumn 2015

.

Please send submissions to poetry@londongrip.co.uk, enclosing
no more than three poems and a brief, 2-3 line, biography
Poems should be in the email body or a single Word attachment

.

.Editorial

In summertime, the London Grip poetry editor’s office alternates between one cliché and another: either a hive of activity or deserted as the Marie Celeste with only a few untouched petits fours left on the tea trolley. During June, July and August the staff may be busy entertaining foreign visitors, travelling abroad on fact-finding expeditions or merely relaxing. And yet, thanks to our excellent contributors, this autumn issue of LG New Poetry has still come together on time.

Distinctive features of this edition include some short and enigmatic prose-poems and David Flynn’s haunting long poem The Ends of the Earth. It must be admitted, however, that the art department has been able to do little more than provide cover images. These relate to poems about courageous women: Emma Lee’s #EmilyMatters which reminds us of the suffragette movement; and Alison Hill’s On Such a Day and Washing our Hair from her sequence about the women pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary.

Looking back to our summer posting it is pleasing to report that the launch reading, hosted by Enfield Poets, was a great success and we hope, from time to time, to celebrate future issues in a similar way.

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs

http://mikeb-b.blogspot.com/

Back to poet list… Forward to first poem

***

Alison Hill: On Such a Day

    Our hearts sank when we guessed
    the worst, or dared to let ourselves imagine.

    On such a day, we stayed on the ground,
     not wishing to tempt fate.

    On such a day we looked upwards,
    almost at the same minute, the same hour.

    We couldn’t help ourselves, automatically
    scanning for any signs of life.

    On such a day we stretched aching
    muscles, pinching our flesh raw while

    waiting for news that never fully surfaced.
    We knew in our hearts she was gone.

Amy Johnson is not only a loss to aviation: those who knew her have lost the type of friend who cannot be replaced. Pauline Gower, The Times, January 1941

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Alison Hill: Washing Our Hair

    The sky was literally a washout –
    the day had been declared one.

    Some despatched to the nearest pub,
    others to find a decent meal.

    I needed some time alone
    and grounded, with space to think.

    Time to enjoy the simple ritual
    of washing, rinsing, towelling –

    scanning myself in the cracked
    mirror above the sink, slick a curl

    or two in their place, paint a smile,
    feign a shrug before an early night.

    Pears soap too, if I was lucky –
    Preparing to be a beautiful lady

    Not much time to prepare really,
    but now and then it did us good

    to remember our skin, our hair,
    what lay beneath our golden wings.

Alison Hill has published two collections, Peppercorn Rent (Flarestack, 2008) and Slate Rising (Indigo Dreams, 2014). She founded the reading series Rhythm & Muse and was Kingston Libraries’ first Poet in Residence (2011/12). Sisters in Spitfires, from which these two poems are taken, is forthcoming from Indigo Dreams. This collection arises from research into the women who flew with the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) in World War II, focusing on their role in the war and their love of the Spitfire in particular, and is supported by the Arts Council.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Bruce Christianson: Romantic Novel

    in the departure lounge
    love sits quietly reading

    a girl catches love's eye
    they're on the same flight

    (the girl doesn't know it but
    love sees all boarding cards)

    on the way to the gate
    love stops off to buy a hat

    as they go down the jetway
    the girl finally smiles back

    & about time too thinks love
    glancing at the safety card

    to memorise the layout
    then leaning back relaxed

                           love enjoys takeoffs
    they start to taxi

Bruce Christianson is a mathematician from New Zealand who has taught in Hertfordshire for 28 years. Love glared at him recently in an airport women-only bookshop.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Fiona Larkin: Passport Queue

    A spiralling wail
    tautens Arrivals,

    cordoning
    a hydra-headed
    crocodile.

    Its attention stirs
    at each gulping
    inhalation,

    and its many
    sunburnt faces,

    grasping pale
    watermarked
    facsimiles
    of themselves,

    are tilted
    by an infant
    puppet master,

    whose cries
    tug the strings
    of eyebrows,

    corrugate
    foreheads,

    narrow lips,

    draw hisses
    toxic to
    his mother.

Fiona Larkin‘s poems have been published in Ink, Sweat & Tears and The Stare’s Nest, and in print in SOUTH Poetry, The Oxford Magazine and South Bank Poetry. She teaches English in the voluntary sector.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Chris Stewart: Masterpiece

    I like crinkled edges
    creases that vein through the composition;
    they make it less pretentious.
    The sides of the triptych are like black batwings.
    It evokes a dark and mysterious mood.
    Twist your head sideways
    you’ll see the genius; it looks good.

    I can see a fluid rainbow
    behind the pall of smokey spillage.
    Perhaps you can make out the slightest dove
    soaring above the abstract landscape?
    That lucky paint leaks a path
    directs our eyes to the smile on our mouths.

    If others saw this work, do you think they’d see what we see?
    Art snobs and critics might be correct
    to say that any common child could have done it
    with their eyes closed, but
    they didn’t, did they? Only one person
    was ever capable of this.
    Would they really look into our daughter’s eyes
    and deny it was a masterpiece?

Chris Stewart is a thirty something year old man who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. He has a lovely long term life partner, a brand new daughter, and participates willingly in domesticated masculinity.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Emma Lee: #EmilyMatters

    I try and see this through a child’s eyes:
    the awkward steps (ramp tucked away at the back),
    warped wooden floor, older women sustained
    by coffee flasks and gossip which I interrupt,
    the booths with a small shelf and pencil
    anchored by twine that’s never long enough
    for left-handers. My child’s attention is drawn
    by a vase: green leaves, white daisies and violets.

    I tell her of a story about a race at Epsom,
    and how a woman tripped in her long skirt,
    her banner trampled by the King’s horse.
    Her jacket had blown open revealing
    green, white and violet (hope, purity and dignity);
    chromatic acronym for ‘give women votes’.
    She lived four days with fatal injuries,
    and would never take her dreamed-of daughter
    to a polling station to vote.

    I give my daughter a badge of pressed flowers.
    My little pencilled cross won’t change much,
    but my daughter will know of a world
    where women couldn’t vote, why Emily matters.

Emma Lee’s latest collection Ghosts in the Desert is available from Indigo Dream Publishing. She blogs at http://emmalee1.wordpress.com and reviews for The Journal, London Grip and Sabotage Reviews.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Ian Humphreys: Bruised

    The bruise mutates.
    Blue bleeds into red.
    Starved of oxygen,
    haemoglobin fortifies flesh
    with iron. She knows
    in a day or two, a jolt of green
    will flood the swelling.

    It will burn its most toxic,
    brand her invisible –
    strangers will turn away.
    She calls it the jade phase,
    a sign the healing process
    is working, her body
    is doing something right.

    It will fade to yellow
    after eight days.
    On the tenth day,
    he’ll return with flowers.
    Her favourite colours
    in a sling of tissue paper.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Ian Humphreys: breathless

    graffiti shouts insults from walls by the chemist
    its colours explode like flung bottles

    I stare at the pavement and I’m late for the 8:22
    to Manchester because I should have left home at 7:55

    but I had to fix the tap or attempt to and now
    if I run I could pratfall like last time and hurt

    my coccyx and rip my trousers and Annie from sales
    will cluck over me at lunch and her breath smells

    of liquorice and I just want to sit quietly at my desk
    and not bother with chit-chat and it’s now 8:17

    and there’s no time to order coffee
    from the man who grunts or grab a gloompaper

    for company on the journey and I need something
    to occupy my mind because if I don’t it ticks

    like a wind-up alarm clock and prick-prick-pricks
    the inside of my skull

    and the train’s pulling in now and I’m queuing politely
    when some idiot pushes past and I smile

    and I’m getting on and I’m looking round
    for an empty seat like that exists at rush hour

    and I’m squashed against a woman with a pushchair
    and my head weighs watermelon fat

    and who brings a child on a crowded train at this time of day
    and I pretend not to notice her or the kid

    but I see the strap of my bag is caught
    in the wheels of the buggy and my inner-Tannoy says

    they’re getting off at the next stop
    they’re getting off at the next stop

    and I brace myself to leave with them to avoid a scene
    then jump back onto the next carriage along

    so no one will spot me re-embarking
    as they may determine I’m acting suspiciously

    and use mobile devices to alert the authorities
    and guards at Stockport might actually

    escort me off the train in front of all these people
    and what will Annie think

Ian Humphreys lives in West Yorkshire and is studying for a Creative Writing MA at MMU. This year his work has appeared or is forthcoming in anthologies and journals including Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, Ink Sweat & Tears, London Grip, Poetry News, Prole and Shadowtrain. He won the 2013 PENfro Poetry Competition and has been shortlisted three times for the Bridport Prize.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Tom McFadden: Somewhere Different, Out Of Sight

    I am still, beneath a bridge of moving vehicles,
    a "still life portrait" inside a dormant car
    across from the Municipal Court Building,
    waiting to join the citizen-renderers
    of whatever jury call awaits.
    It will be time, then, to assess another's bearing
    upon this little square of earth.
    But, for now...

    I watch through the windshield from the parking lot--
    observing a homeless man
    emerge from the wall-hugging bushes,
    tightly wrapped in a big, white blanket
    like a nomad in an urban desert.
    Indecisively, he makes his way to the corner,
    to the red light, where traffic streams
    in all directions through new day,
    and does not know, himself, which way to go,
    until, at last, he does go –
    responding  to a random WALK sign,
    going nowhere:
    somewhere different, out of sight.

    The morning pigeons collect above me,
    on a ledge just below the highway top.
    For awhile, so high, they suggest a poem
    yet, a truck backfires
    and this day's poetry flies away.

    My tenure of stillness elapsed,
    I emerge from where I had slumped unseen,
    slipping from my car's dormancy.
    But the winds prove cold.
    So, I pull at my sweater in random directions
    to be more tightly wrapped,
    then, still distracted by the cold,
    exit the lot to cross at the light when,
    without real thought,
    I barely notice the sign says WALK.

    Inside, in time, we of the jury collect
    to sit together on a wooden ledge;
    and, for just a little while, we look so high.

Tom McFadden is an American poet whose writing has appeared in such venues as Poetry Ireland Review, Voices Israel, Journal Of The American Medical Association, Seattle Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, South Carolina Review, Portland Review & California Quarterly

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Rosie Johnston: Casca’s table

Some of the ancient buildings in Pompeii are named after what was found there. Casca’s House is home to a table bearing Casca’s name though Casca himself was probably never there. He was one of Julius Caesar’s killers and struck the first blow.

    Blue pulsing heat. Geckos hide in
    lesions
    in the walls of Casca’s House.

    A perfect atrium draws
    heat’s cloak
    from my shoulders. Conjures breezes.

    Pale in the gloaming, a marble table
    stands:
    three lions’ maws, three paws.

    There’s his name, the senator –
    P Casca Long –
    engraved with overt pride.

    Words etched deep, but not as deep as
    Casca’s wary jab
    in Caesar’s neck.

    Did this marble come in shame from
    Rome
    cut-price, humbled by Casca’s name?

    Hot-blood war, chill suicide,
    the table
    keeps its witness to itself.

    I sway: a toga brushed my arm
    unseen.
    Outdoor torpor revives me.

Rosie Johnston’s three poetry pamphlets are published by Lapwing Publications (Belfast). She is Poet in Residence for the Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Robert Nisbet: The Bus Down

    We were talking about you, much of the time,
    on the bus down from Aber, due to reach your cottage
    at about the time night comes stealing up on afternoon.
    And the picture of your cottage up that lane
    claimed us: the fox whose bark cracks across your windows
    two nights in five; your wealth of bramble,
    heavy with berry every August; the tiny summerhouse
    with crazy trellis-work, half in use. And your well.
    The handle hasn’t worked since just before
    the Second War, but it’s your well, rusted maybe
    but its depths plumb-green. Yes,
    your life in that clearing will please all poetry men.
    Say what the world will, you are
    our talisman, crop-tending, wood-burning, real.

Robert Nisbet was for some years an associate lecturer in creative writing at Trinity College, Carmarthen. His poems appear in magazines like The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, Dream Catcher, The Journal, Prole, Scintilla and (in the USA) in The Camel Saloon, Hobo Camp Review and Main Street Rag.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
***

Katherine Venn: Liturgy for walking in the wind

     	– the desire to have covered this stretch
    already, rather than to be outside still walking it
    contending with your own animal softness

    and a force greater than yourself
    unravelling from you
    all unnecessary complications

    though now it seems to fight you
    will strip you of yourself
    of even the breath
    inside you

    – trust that the wind can take your weight
    holds you
    and know that it turns helper
    as it swings to push you home.

Katherine Venn was born in London, and grew up somewhere between there, the United States, Liverpool and Kent, before studying English Literature and Language at Oxford and then returning to London to work in publishing. In 2009/10 she took a year out to take the poetry strand of the creative writing MA at UEA, She currently works part-time at Hodder & Stoughton as a commissioning editor, and until 2014 she coordinated the literature programme for Greenbelt arts festival. She has been published in the Duino International Poetry Competition’s anthology, Roads; in the UEA anthology Eight Poets: 2009; and her work has appeared on-line in Caught by the River and London Grip as well as in Magma and Third Way print magazines. She has won scholarships to study and write at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, and was poet in residence at the Diocese of Norfolk’s Pentecost Festival in 2012.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Ruth Bidgood: Now

    Waking from a muddle of dreams
    to a fogbound search
    for meaning, one may find
    forming , beyond the murk
    of an unpropitious day, a blur of sun.

    Sensations proclaim themselves –
    drizzle whisking by
    as a wind gets up: drift
    of small leaves;
    clunk, settling of poles
    on a timber-lorry passing;
    click and whoosh of an opening door.

    There’s a jangle of notes, off-key,
    unbeautiful but live; tap of a pencil
    dropped on wood; rattle of rings
    as a window is bared,
    and sun’s rays reach at last
    through misted panes to light
    the undeniable  now.

Ruth Bidgood lives in mid-Wales. Her collection Time Being (Seren, 2009) won the Roland Mathias Award 2011. Her most recent one is Above the Forests (Cinnamon Press, 2012). It was jointly launched with Matthew Jarvis’s Ruth Bidgood (UWP, 2012).

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Mary Franklin: The time of no time

    It was the time of no time
    before the white men came with clocks
    that measured everything.

    We lived by seasons here and now:
    woke from winter’s sacred time of healing
    when spring’s wrists were wreathed in lilacs,
    caught summer salmon swimming upriver to spawn
    and dried them with berries in autumn bonfires.

    Always we followed the buffalo
    our teepees strapped to travois
    pulled by dogs and horses.
    White men watched with empty eyes.
    They asked no questions.

    It was the time of no time
    before the covered wagon brought
    the white man with red spots:
    my people died like ants under a bear’s paw.
    The white men did not die.  Why?

    Tick tock tick tock ticks the white man’s clock.
    The time of no time has passed and gone.
    It will not come again.

Mary Franklin has had poems published in Iota, The Open Mouse, Ink Sweat and Tears, London Grip, Message in a Bottle, The Stare’s Nest, three drops from a cauldron and various anthologies. Her tanka have appeared in poetry journals in Australia, Canada, UK and USA. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Clare Crossman: Suddenly

(For Anna)

    Owls have come to sit in our fir trees:
    they don’t often leave the wood by the river,
    I dislike their return.

    I have seen their wings as they drop,
    catching mice on the bright fell,
    carrying them skyward, screeching.

    Like omens, they have arrived
    just as you are suddenly gone.
    Dark eyed and serious, twenty and dead.

    What you were, who you might be
    snuffed out to be, ash, owl-pellets
    strewn on the lawn.

    I can’t ask you what it is like to be fixed
    in one time and place; this date in mid-summer.
    Vanished, to be perpetually a bright shooting star.

    Become a girl who hunts across heaven,
    with a golden bow and arrow,
    and comets for a crown.

    Enough to say we are dumb.
    Hooting one note like these birds
    with the wing-span of angels.

    Older. Diminished.
    We blink in the July dark.
    Unable to conjure you home.

Clare Crossman lives near Cambridge. Vanishing Point, a second collection of poem,s was recently published by Shoestring Press. She runs poetry readings and workshops in association with the Cambridge Art Salon.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

F M Brown: The Way Things Were?

Oh, Mike, yes, he’s been away a long time now.

Nerves, is it? Repressed emotion I expect. You know he never really got over Lad, his red setter, dying. I remember his mother saying to me, “He’s only shed a couple of tears. He hasn’t grieved properly.”

The very same thing happened to another friend of mine. His dog had to be put down. Lovely golden Rinty. He did Love that dog. I was the one who had to break it to him. We were very close, me and him. He howled like a dog himself when I told him.

That was me. Rinty was mine. It wasn’t you that told me.

Well, I remember I had something to do with it. I know, You were away working that summer in Finland and I heard about Rinty before you did. Your mother said I hadn’t to mention it in my letters to you.

Incidentally, now I come to think about it, Mike’s dog was A square cocker spaniel called Bridget. Lad was altogether another more modern tragedy. He wasn’t even a red setter.

FM Brown was born in Sheffield but had to come south to soft Bedfordshire to begin writing poetry

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Keith Nunes: pitiless sky

honestly, it looks like the same sky I left behind in my twenties, all mottled and angry and full of seriousness, I swear it wants me dead and it’ll get its way one day, the same sky hanging hungrily as I’m buried and me wondering how it has such staying power

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.

.

.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Keith Nunes: the blender is faulty

he kept trying to make it right with his wife, quietly achieving with implements and applications; and through the rooms where water ran, he accepted the blends of bitter and sweet while driving yabbering facial expressions up and down roads of stutters; but the tones of voices and the tones of skin put him in his unholy place – at the end of a barge pole with a pain so intense his soul was becoming an anarchist

Keith Nunes (Tauranga, New Zealand) was a newspaper sub-editor for more than 20 years but he now writes to stay sane. He’s been published around NZ and increasingly in the UK (London Grip, Prole, Iota) and US, was highly commended in the 2014 NZ Poetry Society international poetry competition and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. He lives with artist Talulah Belle and a coterie of nutters.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

S J Mannion: Orzo

I stand by the cooker watching water, waiting for it to come to a rolling boil. I love that particular pairing of words. I love the way they feel on my tongue as I say them out loud and I love the way, though they are words about heat and hotness, they caress the inside of my head like cool glass marbles. After a while the watched pot boils and I throw in handfuls of pasta. Hotly splashing and then sinking. Like so many tiny slippers or even little toenails. This in turn reminds me of something. Something I have held in my mind for some time. I read of it and it took root. This is the trouble with words. Dangerous, damaging, descriptive things. I cannot rid myself of this image. Children’s shoes indiscriminately heaped and piled up outside the gas chambers of Belsen.

S J Mannion writes: “I am an Irish writer living in Christchurch, being middle aged, married-with-three, doing domesticity. When I can I write, when I can’t I read.”

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
***

Peter Daniels: Slow News

    For the slow burning stories, the old time newsman
    gives thanks. Their rumours rustling the undergrowth,
    their stupid perpetrators happy in their burrows.
    Cultivating every piece of fact, a good contact
    made safe and useful. The lull
    in the story, weeks, months, years even of space
    but the track continues. Dead ends will start
    to grow. The dormant grudges get their
    motivation. Some moment, maybe a distant car horn,
    and it breaks. You’re the one with the twanging string
    and the trembling arrow in a tree trunk.
    They like it, back at the desk. You can
    write it into headlines fat as sausages in lard.
    Breakfast with the paper,
    all the trimmings.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Peter Daniels: Forget

    The earth moves me. It gives me my sustenance:
    the place I can't escape or understand, beyond
    handling roots in the dust, if I remember
    to wait on what’s down there, underneath me.

    They’re playing music in the cemetery ruins.
    Time loosens the bodies from the strong hold
    of the chiselled epitaphs. Under the overgrowth,
    earth waits in its ivy and mud-caked pathways

    ready to receive us, soldiers marching into the hill,
    mariners back to our harbour, stuffed relics
    of animals lost in the glass-case forest.
    The earth will forget. It owns us, nonetheless.

Peter Daniels has won several competitions including the Arvon, Ledbury and TLS. He has published pamphlets including the obscene historical Ballad of Captain Rigby, the full collection Counting Eggs (2012), and translations of Vladislav Khodasevich from Russian (2013).

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Rangi Faith: Tomb-sweeping day

    Now I understand this:

    the generosity of a river
    beside hallowed ground –

    how the waters
    carry the pain –

    and this:
    the spirit living
    in each slab of marble,
    each cross
    each unlikely offering;

    and

    how one man’s sweeping
    is his gift,
    his link
    to the people
    of the past.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Rangi Faith: Rakaia Gorge Wind

May 2015

    Below the gorge
    from bridge to braid
    it’s eye-watering stuff:

    this nor’wester is hellbent
    on cooking up a storm

    filleting the river
    clear off the bone

    laying the ribs
    of the battered bedrock bare

    lifting grit & pinbones
    into the floury sky
    & skinning the greywacke clean

    wind slices through water
    like the fins of big salmon

    sifted air
    powders the surface
    with schools of small, frightened fish.

Rangi Faith is a poet, editor and critic who has been widely published throughout New Zealand and overseas. Poetry books include Spoonbill 101 (Puriri Press, Auckland, 2014), Conversation With A Moahunter (Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2005) and Rivers Without Eels (Huia Press, Wellington, 2001). A retired teacher, he has also edited poetry books for students including Dangerous Landscapes (Longman Paul, 1994) an anthology of poetry for secondary students.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Nancy Mattson: Scale, Skin, Hair

    Braids have purposes, they know
    from the scalp, their source
    that they will end

    in flimsiness, a tail-swish
    as hair gives way
                             to air

                             Gulping salmon
                             beckoned through scale and skin
                             by a wish as strong
                             as mother-love

                                    return to their natal rivers
                                    scale rapids and waterfalls
                                    to reach gravel-bedded riffles
                                                     spawn and die

    I remember my mother
    braiding my hair, the ritual
    of scoring my scalp with a steel
    			                         rat-tail

    I did not squirm
                      Skull and roots hurt
                                Each hair, root to tip
                                had to learn its place

    This tarnished mirror remembers bright
    fat plaits that narrowed
    dwindled
    faded
                              like feather tips
                              or wisps of whale baleen
                              for sifting krill

                             like the skirt of a worn-out
                             dancer, her ragged hems sodden
                             as she waded into the sea

Nancy Mattson was born near the Red River in Winnipeg, raised near the North Saskatchewan in Edmonton, and now lives near the Thames in London. Her third full-length collection is Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead Press, 2012). She co-organizes Poetry in the Crypt in Islington.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Cathleen Allyn Conway: Letting Go

    I make paper boats,
    coat them in paraffin
    to make them watertight.
    I place a paper doll
    on each stern
    and a votive in the hold.
    I release them onto the river,
    a flickering flotilla of white petals,
    each launching into oblivion
    the girl who...,
                the girl who...,
                            the girl who...,

Cathleen Allyn Conway is a PhD student at Goldsmiths College, University of London, researching the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She is co-editor of Plath Profiles, a peer-reviewed academic journal, and poetry editor for Blotterature literary magazine. Her pamphlet Static Cling was published in 2012 by Dancing Girl Press. She can be found on Twitter at @mllekitty.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Sarah James: Black Market

on the 30th anniversary of perestroika

    All Eva’s dolls have Russian names.
    Their hollow faces hide in or behind
    the others’, disown fault and blame.

    Political matryoshka, they impose fear
    like real presidents – scowling down
    with black smiles, and ears that don’t hear.

    Beneath the gloss of wooden-shell suits
    a nested space of secrets – perfect
    for hiding notes when bartering for food.

    Dollar bills still rub like gritty hunger
    against unvarnished splinters inside.
    She keeps the layered stash unplundered

    to remind herself of survival’s price.

Sarah James’ latest collections are The Magnetic Diaries (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press), a narrative in poems, and plenty-fish from Nine Arches Press. The Oxford University modern languages graduate was winner of theOverton Poetry Prize 2015 and a poem from The Magnetic Diaries was highly commended in this year’s Forward Prizes. Her website is at www.sarah-james.co.uk and she runs the small poetry imprint, V. Press.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
***

Wendy French: The Tower

    It causes him to be sent to the Tower. Absent for a time.
    Re-appears. Another operation, more chemo.

    Doors locked against visitors and night.
    He’s hated locked doors since a child – once playing

    in his grandmother’s house he climbed to the attic,
    turned the key, smothered his hands in a trunk of wigs.

    The view, through an isolated room, is of London
    and sky. There’s not a sunflower or staircase in sight.

    So what is it about locked doors that make him write
    letters he knows will never be sent?

    He re-enters his grandmother’s room and searches
    for mannequin wigs to wear when doors open freely.

    He’ll walk sideways along corridors
    into rooms full of paraphernalia.

The Tower is the nuclear-medicine department of University College London Hospital (UCLH) where treatment and research exist.

Wendy French has just finished a Poet in Residency at the Macmillan Cancer Centre, UCLH. She is currently working on poems to reflect on this residency and the vulnerability of us all.
Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Tracey Peterson : Sweeping The Porch

    Like her herbaceous border the bridal store window dresses
    always catch her eye.  As the light turns green they say it has to
    be love that makes people want to be together.  Nothing else.

    Home now.  She sweeps the porch.  Readies for their arrival.

    The wardrobe door opens on a mirror of memory and disregard.
    Tastes and preferences. The detail everything.

    Cutting, the page-boy-deflation.  Blatant, sharp-edged.  No it’s
    definitely not a page-boy.  She hates page-boys.

    So able to recognize it now.  What matters.  What doesn’t.
    Him hanging-up on her in front of them.  Her trying to hide it.

    The writer’s workshop advises not to make the theme too obvious.
    That’s the problem.  All of this.  So obvious, it’s glaring.

Tracey Peterson is a New Zealand based writer and lover of poetry, completely passionate about it, having read, written and performed it from a young age and in her adult years having taught it to children from 5 to 16 years. She is a graduate of Canterbury University having studied English, Linguistics and Education, and is currently working on what she hopes will be her first publishable collection of poetry.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Merryn Williams: It’s Happened

    Over the leagues, through the December darkness,
    from two old friends, unuttered words are blown.
    You’re in the north, the ship canal is freezing;
    I’m here.   I don’t, you don’t pick up the phone.

    Mistletoe tosses in the naked branches
    we view through glass; this year there’ll be no kiss.
    Ahead, the solstice looms, our days diminish.
    I can’t, you can’t believe it’s come to this.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Merryn Williams: Do Not Disturb

    Some days I switch off telephones, the iPad,
    radio, the ubiquitous TV,
    muffle the doorbell too, block out the jangling
    voices of all who wish to get at me,

    and ring you up, tell you (my lips just moving)
    the family news.  Although the real phone’s dead
    and someone else has got your number, I can
    still activate the line inside my head.

    Another old friend gone.  And two more married.
    The words are mouthed.  If you were here, you’d know.
    The baby was a girl.  No doubt some people
    would think me mad.  I tell you, even so.

Merryn Williams was the founding editor of The Interpreter’s House. Her third collection, The First Wife’s Tale, was long-listed for the Welsh Book of the Year; a fourth collection is expected this winter. Her biography, Effie: A Victorian Scandal: From Ruskin’s Wife to Millais’ Muse, was turned into a Random House audiobook this year

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
***

David Flynn: The Ends of the Earth

     The Jian Zhen
              plowed
                       the dark jade water
    of the East China Sea
              between Kobe and Shanghai,
              between you and me.
    Rusted
    and slow
              it paces
              back and forth
              between Kobe and Shanghai
              as we do not.
    Year after year
              we do not see
              the other's face,
              nor touch
              the other's coat,
              nor embrace
              the other's body.
    Now we live                                                                          a thousand miles apart.

    But on the Jian Zhen
              plowing
                       the dark jade water
    of the East China Sea
              between Kobe and Shanghai,
              between you and me,
    we stood
              on the same deck.
    I watched you
              in motion,
              braced against the winter wind
              that white-capped the sea.

    Later, lost
               – a backstreet of Shanghai –
              we touched
              coats.
    Striding,
              arms around the physical waists,
              you and I
              shouted Christmas carols
              to Chinese walls.
    We let go
              on the sidewalk
                       in front of
                       the Peace Hotel.
              Meaning:
              a rain of spirit
              wet the inside of me.
             The center of my body
    sagged.
             You
              too
              were water flowing by.
              A radio that failed.
              A house that burnt down.
             You
              too
              were water flowing by.
    We embraced
              coats,
              a statue,
              stones in a Chinese current,
              hugging
              on the sidewalk
                       in front of
                       the Peace Hotel.

    I felt you feel
              a second of being dead
              too.

    But you and I turned lovers
    flooded with touch.
              Millions of words
              from the visible lips.
    Night after night
              the radiation of your skin
              made red the chill of Japanese spring.
    Together:
              Cherry blossoms on the Uji River
              and a cup of green tea.
    Together:
              A pilgrimage to Shodoshima,
                       an island
                       of the Inland Sea,
              where
              we saw the priest's face flickering in red candlelight;
              we heard monkeys chattering on the temple roof;
              we felt the wooden gate smoothed by seven centuries of hands.

    At nights
              on Shodoshima,
                       an island
                       of the inland sea,
              we lay on the tatami.
              My skin and your skin,
                                                    real,
              pushed to their soft limits,
              while our spirits,
                                         ghosts,
              continued in
              toward merger.
    That summer you moved
              to your American city.
    And I moved
              to my American city.
    Now we live                                                                          a thousand miles apart.
             Year after year
             we talk
              by telephone:
                       the news that lifts nothing.
    It is not enough.
              Your voice and your spirit
              arrive at my receiver.
    But they are not enough.
              Earth  air  water  fire
              eyes  fingers  lips
              movement when you are not speaking
             expression  reaction
             wasted time
             everything
             is what I                    need of you.
             Is what I desperately need of you.

    The Jian Zhen
              plows
                       the dark jade water
    of the East China Sea
              between Kobe and Shanghai,
              between you and me.
    Rusted
    and slow
              it paces
              back and forth
              between Kobe and Shanghai
              as we wait by
              telephones
              in the alternative hemisphere.

David Flynn was born in the textile mill company town of Bemis, TN. His jobs have included newspaper reporter, magazine editor and university teacher. He has five degrees and is both a Fulbright Senior Scholar and a Fulbright Senior Specialist currently on the roster. His literary publications total more than one hundred and seventy. David Flynn’s writing blog, where he posts a new story and poem every month, is at http://writing-flynn.blogspot.com/. His web site is at http://www.davidflynnbooks.com .

Back to poet list…

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

### Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.